With the midterm elections now just three weeks away, it’s clear that the Latino vote will play a decisive role in the outcomes in two of the closest states: Arizona and Nevada. In each state, the gubernatorial race is up for grabs, and while Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly holds a clear lead over Republican Blake Masters in Arizona, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is either running even with or slightly trailing her Republican challenger, Adam Laxalt, in Nevada. The prospect of Republican Kari Lake winning the Arizona gubernatorial contest is particularly ominous, as Lake has made the Big Lie of Trump’s supposed 2020 "victory" in her state the central theme of her campaign, and the thought of her administration running the state’s 2024 presidential election imperils every small-d democratic norm in the book.

Arizona (32 percent) and Nevada (29 percent) rank fourth and fifth among the 50 states, respectively, in the share of their populations that are Latino. As Latinos have a lower rate of voter participation than many other groups (they have a higher share of under-18-year-olds and a lower share of citizens), they are underrepresented in those states’ electorates, but with the elections so close in both those states, their presence is still plenty large, and way more than large enough to swing the elections.

Monday’s poll on midterm voting in The New York Times and Sunday’s poll on the Latino vote in particular in The Washington Post have fairly comparable numbers on the overall Latino vote: 60 percent for Democrats and 34 percent for Republicans in the Times, 63 for Democrats and 36 for Republicans in the Post. (The Times poll appears to have polled roughly 100 Latinos; the Post poll, which was only of Latinos, polled 1,008 who were validated registered voters.)

The same 63-to-36 margin that was the total for all Latinos in the Post poll was replicated in that poll’s numbers on the largest religious subgroup, Catholics, who also split 63-to-36. Protestant evangelicals in the Post’s poll had precisely the reverse result: 36 percent for Democrats, 63 percent for Republicans. "Atheists, Agnostics and Nothing in Particulars" came in at 79 percent for Democrats and 19 percent for Republicans. As Latino evangelicals, like evangelicals generally, are found disproportionately in the South, the Democrats’ lead among Dixie Latinos is just nine percentage points; it’s much higher in the nation’s other quadrants.

In American politics today, religious evangelicals are overwhelmingly Republican and their stance on culture war issues is more determinative of their partisan alignment than those issues are for other voters. But decades of polling show that most Latinos—evangelicals excepted—vote chiefly on economic issues: on which party appears to favor policies producing more jobs, higher wages, greater and more affordable educational opportunities, more affordable health care, and, generally, more affordable economic basics. Advantage Democrats this year on all but the last, and it’s the failure of the Democrats to make their case on every one of those points but the last one that could well cost them in the midterms—most especially among Latino voters in Nevada and Arizona. The failure of Nevada Democrats, who currently control both the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature, to enact rent control could prove a crippling handicap to their electoral prospects next month, as rents in Clark County (that is, Greater Las Vegas, which is home to three-quarters of Nevadans) have soared over the past year.

The inverse relationship between the politics of Latino Catholics and Latino evangelicals also highlights a fundamental conundrum for the American Catholic Church. The right wing of that church is personified by such ultra-right Benedict appointees as Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, who sought, unsuccessfully, to have the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemn and deny Communion to President Biden, and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who did condemn and deny Communion to San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi, in both cases because of their support for a woman’s right to choose.

Under Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, the Vatican made clear that it was opposed to such neo-Inquisitional stances, and Francis has gone on to appoint a liberal Catholic, Robert McElroy, to be archbishop of San Diego. Earlier this year, Francis also elevated McElroy to the rank of cardinal, while passing over the two more senior California archbishops, Gomez and Cordileone.

All this suggests one way to resolve the rifts dividing the Catholic Church. Given that the Benedictine wing of the Church is profoundly out of step with two-thirds of the nation’s Latino Catholics, but clearly in step with two-thirds of Latino evangelicals, why don’t they simply leave the American Church behind and set up shop with those evangelicals? At the outer fringes of each tendency, there might even be a linguistic convergence, with the ultra-Benedictines bringing back the Latin Mass while the ultra-evangelicals can speak in tongues. Neither group, after all, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, so speaking in languages alien to liberal modernity should come naturally to both.